Updates from the edge of the Web

Introducing a Minimalist HTML5 Game Template

Today, we’re releasing version 0.1 of an HTML5 game template (the github repo). This template provides basic infrastructure so that as a game developer, you don’t need to do a bunch of busy work to get started: you can hit the ground coding. As no particular engine or framework is assumed, it is usable for any sort of game.

Higher-level, specialized templates can easily be built on top of this. We will build one specifically for the Gladius engine in the near future. One could imagine others like a side-scroller template, or a simple canvas game for new JS developers.

Note: This template is currently focused entirely on the browser-based pieces of a game. Making it easy for a game to offer a Node-based server-side component is likely to be in scope in the fairly near future.

Your Thoughts & Feedback

We’d be grateful for all feedback about this template, whether in blog comments or github issues, or pull requests. To help make this template more useful, we’d especially love to get your thoughts on a couple of specific issues:

Would you prefer to be responsible for your own game loop, or would you prefer to use a default gameloop provided by the template? Please add comments to this github issue.

If you’ve worked on an HTML5 game, what did you find to be the most annoying hurdle when getting started? Please add comments to this github issue.

This looks like a great start! I would love to see more specific templates/frameworks too, such as “make your own browserquest”. I enjoyed reading the browserquest code and felt that something generally useful could be extracted from that code base.

Yes, completely agreed that it’d be nice to put together specific templates. I’m hoping to start reaching out to folks who might be interested in building such things. Is trying to do that from the BrowserQuest code something you’re inclined to try?